MONSTER SQUAD

The designers of the original Predator on the evolution of their grisly creation

1. MONSTROUS MONSTER

A company called Boss Film was originally tasked with creating the Predator suit, then a more organic design, and housing none other than Jean-claude Van Damme. It was a disaster from the start. “Steve Johnson from Boss Film was not happy about that creature at all,” says Steve Wang, who was there as a sculptor. “He kept complaining about how it was a terrible design, but he was forced to build it because the design came directly from the studio. The biggest problem everyone saw right from day one was the fact he had this leg extension, and the technology for it back then wasn’t far along — people couldn’t really walk in it, and not being able to walk on that terrain in the middle of the jungle, it’s horrible. It was just a bad idea.”

2. BELGIAN VS PREDATOR

When the suit was unveiled in the Mexican jungle, spirits immediately sank. Van Damme, a martial arts star in waiting, hated the experience. “People said he was complaining that they were covering his face,” says Wang, “because he said he was gonna be a big star. People thought that was funny: ‘Had no-one told you that you were actually going to be a monster?’” Besides, being encased in the thing troubled the actor physically. “I heard he was very claustrophobic,” says Wang. “So when they put the suit on him he kind of froze.” Van Damme spent an unhappy two days on set, and was no doubt relieved to escape the experience when, with an unworkable creature, the production was put on hiatus. At least one shot of Van Damme’s invisible Predator remains in the film — that of Shane Black being dragged to his death.

3. HIGH CONCEPT

With the shoot on hold, Stan Winston was hired to create a new Predator from scratch, thanks to his success on Aliens and his friendship with Arnold Schwarzenegger. A designer named Alan Munro had painted the Predator as a futuristic, humanoid soldier with dreadlocks, and Winston was asked to draw the face under the mask. “The big emphasis was, ‘This thing has to work,’” says Stan Winston’s son Matt, “because the Boss Film design had been impractical. And Dad said, ‘If we’re dealing with a man in a suit, let’s really break ground with the face.’”

4. NO SLEEP TILL MEXICO

With the Stan Winston Studio already busy, and Winston focused on his directorial debut Pumpkinhead, a tiny team — Steve Wang, Matt Rose and Shannon Shea — had eight weeks to build the Predator from scratch. “It was insane, we literally weren’t sleeping for three days at a time just to get things done,” says Wang. “Oh my God, I can’t tell you the hours,” sighs Shea. “Years later I was working on Predators, and one of the painters was saying how much he admired Steve Wang and wanted to paint the new Predator with the same passion that he did, and I said, ‘Well, then you can’t leave the studio. Steve and Matt wouldn’t leave the studio.’ They would sleep on the sofas.” Rose still seems scarred. “It was crazy,” he says. “Everyone was really worn out with it. We were all working way too long, we wouldn’t even go home. It was a very different time then. Not as romantic as people think it is.”

5. BLADES OF GLORY

Director John Mctiernan told Winston he wanted the Predator to be more technological, so Wang set about designing some blades for the creature’s arm — because of his love of a certain hairy mutant. “I was a huge fan of Wolverine and I kind of ripped it off,” he laughs. “I was a big kid, loving superheroes, so I thought: ‘Let’s do some blades!’” Wang would take inspiration from anywhere and everywhere. For the paint job on the armour, he found what he was looking for in... a puddle. “Steve was so frustrated because he didn’t want the paint job to just be chrome,” says Rose. “It was the ’80s and everything was chrome or gold or brass, boring. His head was spinning. We were walking and he stopped and pointed at the ground and said, ‘That’s it.’ And it was this puddle. I thought, ‘That’s it, Steve has gone completely mad.’ But in the puddle was motor oil, which had that rainbow effect. He said, ‘That’s the armour colour.’ That’s how he came up with it.”

6. FACE ACHE

The Predator’s mandibles came from a surprising source. Flying to an Aliens event in Japan with James Cameron, Winston sketched some early ideas, and Cameron sneaked a peek. “James looked over Dad’s shoulder while he was sketching,” says Winston, “and he said, ‘I always wanted to see mandibles on a monster.’ So Dad experimented with that.” With the design signed off, Winston tasked Richard Landon with building the mechanics. “I had no experience of radio-controlled mechanisms,” says Landon. “I’d only built cable-controlled mechanisms. But Stan said, ‘I want you to figure this out.’ So I did.” Tensions, though, were rising. “Stan asked Richard to do that first, then have me sculpt on top,” remembers Rose. “And I said, ‘No!’ I was 21, and I was pissed off. I said, ‘We have no time for this nonsense. I’ll sculpt it, and Richard will make it fit. Take it or leave it.’ The head was already too huge, even with Kevin Peter Hall’s proportions. It was lucky I said no, because the head would have been at least one-and-a-half times too big. It’s still too big.”

7. CLAW LORE

A maquette builder called Wayne Sturm had created the first 3D reference model for the Predator, and on the side of the ankle was a claw. Rose, says Wang, then did the fine detailing on it — but the claw’s origins are not steeped in deep lore. “Things happened so fast, a lot of times we just made shit up as we went,” says Wang. “It was literally, ‘A claw would look cool, put a claw on it.’ No-one questioned it. A lot of the iconic things from those days was just people making shit up, and then it’s on screen.” Shea agrees, although he puts such activity down to “sheer panic. Matt watching the hands of a clock move and just doing it. And I don’t recall in the original art that Predator was wearing sandals. I don’t know when that happened. But Matt sculpted him wearing sandals. The Predator can turn himself invisible, he can fly across the universe, and he’s basically wearing Birkenstocks. You’d think he’d be wearing something a little more substantial.”

8. THE MAN IN THE LATEX MASK

Kevin Peter Hall’s height was perfect for the Predator, and the suit was then built to capitalise on his idiosyncrasies. “Kevin was very tall but his upper body was small, compared to his legs,” remembers Wang. “I wanted the Predator to have more of a muscular dancer’s body, and not as big as Arnold, because he needed to climb trees. So I made his upper body a bit bigger to balance off his legs.” Shea recalls how they had to slide the actor into the suit with not a millimetre to spare. “You had to make the suit as tight as humanly possible in order for it to move well and not bunch up in the elbows or shoulders or groin. We had to put KY Jelly on Kevin to get him into the suit. He’d put on this powder blue spandex suit and we would get tubes of KY, slather him up and put him in.”

9. EXPLOSIVE ACTION

On set, in the suit, Hall buoyed everybody with his sheer enthusiasm. “Kevin was amazing,” says Wang. “We thought the Predator would be more aggressive, and move fast, but Kevin’s take was more methodical, more graceful.” Fortunately, he also survived certain death when the Predator’s rockets exploded in his face. “The shoulder cannon was supposed to fire at the critter that runs out of the log,” remembers Landon, “but instead of firing a single blast, it unwrapped in a ball of flame that engulfed Kevin’s head. And it let out a cloud of smoke half the size of an automobile. I was ten metres away and a small piece of exploding shrapnel nicked me in the collar bone and drew a little bit of blood. The gun was completely destroyed, it vaporised like a giant firecracker. All of us shook with panic. But without missing a beat, Kevin stepped forward out of the cloud and said, ‘What happened?’ He’d been wearing the stunt head, so a three-inch thick foam-padded football helmet. He was accidentally wearing protective gear.”

10. PREDATOR PREDATORS VS

One of the first shots on the film was of the Predator emerging from the lagoon. Filmed in sections over two weeks, to grasp the small slither of daily magic hour the jungle provided, they finally got it, divers weighing down Hall each time before he rose up. The bigger problem was creepy-crawlies. “That damn lagoon, it had snakes in it,” emembers Rose. “Killer snakes. Deadly. I’m not joking in any way. They called it ‘two steps’, because they bite you, you take two steps and you’re dead. We came across a baby one that Brian Simpson [creature effects] killed by one of our coolers. He killed it really quickly, just pulled a knife out, slammed it down and chopped it in half. It was spinning around for what seemed like half an hour. And that lagoon was also filled with leeches! I wouldn’t go near that damn lagoon but Kevin wasn’t nervous at all, he would go right in.”

11. “DAD’S FRANKENSTEIN”

All of the crew speak of Winston with deep affection. “He was really my mentor,” says Wang. “Taught me a lot of good life lessons, shared a lot of his wisdom with me. I worked hard and tried to make him proud.” Shea says similar: “Stan was like a dad to a lot of us. We were young men and we looked up to him and wanted to be like him. He was so charismatic and so generous. He basically said, ‘I’m gonna put this multi-million picture in your lap. And you’re gonna deliver it.’ Us three children.” Winston, meanwhile, remembers how proud his father was of the creature they all created. “Predator stood as one of the titans of the many characters that came out of the Stan Winston Studio,” he says. “It truly became an iconic character — in some ways it was Dad’s Frankenstein. It spawned many sequels, has lived on in comic books and video games. That was the one for him. He drew that guy, and his team made that first one. These artists got no sleep and helped Dad make it a reality.”

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ART OF MAKING MONSTER SUITS AND MAKE-UP EFFECTS, FROM THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PREDATOR SUIT, HEAD TO STANWINSTONSCHOOL.COM